Well, it's been a while since I posted, and I don't know why. I guess I kinda kept going to GameFAQs instead of GameSpot. However, I'm back, now, because I realized that Gamespot is an awesome gaming website.

That, and my girlfriend has gone to Wisconsin for college, and while I do miss her a lot, it's freed up my schedule for a lot of video games, Youtube videos, and this. :D

So, as you all know, it's a new age of gaming. New technologies, new systems, new video games, new everything. The biggest of the "New" is of course, the Internet.

Ah, the internet. Man's greatest invention. It helps us communicate with one other, keep long-distance relationships afloat, and let everyone game with everyone else. And the best part is, if multiplayer games are exploited somehow, the developers can say "CAN'T LET U DU TAT, HAXOR" and fix whatever glitch some loser is using to win.

However, like all good things, there is a bad side to it. It seems to me that game developers, while using the Internet for good, also use it to procrastinate (which I guess is evil). They release a game too early, with bugs and glitches everywhere, and then patch it later. Now, I'm not in the video game industry at all, but does this strike anyone else as a waste of time and money? If developers just waited an extra month to work out the kinks, they wouldn't have to go back and patch it.

Gears of War is a great example of this, both of them, though for the first one I'll give Epic the benefit of the doubt. However, the glitches were so numerous that they had to patch multiplayer many times, and there are still ways to do some glitches. Now, granted, you'll never have a glitch-free multiplayer, but it took them a while to minimize it. When Gears 2 came out, guess how long it took for glitchers to find their way around? Less than a day. Epic dropped the ball on that. Instead of making it as good as they could before, they released it too early, and decided to "just patch it" as it went on.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, I do consider weapon sliding a glitch. It's not in the manual, and thus it's cheating to do it.

Another great example is Mercenaries 2. Oh, boy, that game was just all around a bad mess. It was so rushed that even some achievements were bugged and didn't unlock for some people. Why would someone do that? Pandemic spent a long time making this? Of course, they just thought "Oh, whatever, we'll just patch it," and they even did that wrong, because some patches brought on new glitches. It's still not completely fixed, to my knoweldge.

My last example is not patch related, it's just a lazy company. Valve is supposedly beloved by the gaming community by bringing us Left 4 Dead, Half Life, and Portal. However, Gabe bleeping Newell, the founder of Valve, is the laziest, biggest d-bag I've ever met.
At first, I thought he was a cool guy, making cool games and doesn't afraid of anything. Then I saw an interview on Youtube. When asked about the PS3, he said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that Valve couldn't figure out how to work the PS3 hardware, so he just said "screw it, we're not making PS3 anything."

Excuse me? Did he just bleeping say that? He basically said "I don't want to do half of what my job requires." He just gave up on working the PS3, and now he's sticking to the 360 and the PC just because he couldn't be bothered. What the heck? In any other job, if he said "I'm going to ignore this part of my job," he would be fired. On. The. Spot. You don't just alienate at least half of your fanbase, Gabe. I'm sorry if this is earth-shattering to you, but the PS3 hardware is manageable. Heck, if EA can do it with Dead Space, I'm sure you and your crack team of programmers can figure it out.

Rant over. If I ever see Gabe on the street, I'm giving him a swift punch in the face. It's not like he'll feel it, though; his double-chin will probably absorb the blow.